Many municipalities and cities are facing numerous, sometimes very complex water management challenges. In addition to heavy rainfall events, because of climate change, this also applies to the necessary improvement of water quality about trace substances and micro plastics. This also means an increase in the complexity of tasks, a diversity of levels of action and knowledge. The necessary freedom to acquire new knowledge in an appropriate manner in terms of content and time is becoming increasingly limited because of these framework conditions. An additional burden is the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain adequate specialized staff. Therefore, the necessary planning processes are becoming longer. The implementation of environmental protection measures has to follow later. Furthermore, new, and more efficient methods for better environmental protection are used less frequently or only insufficiently because there is too little knowledge about them. Experts promise more support and facilitation by solutions that have been developed during digitalization and offered on the market for technical and organizational level [1]. Here, however, there is often a lack of time on the user’s side to act in an appropriate manner with resource- supporting IT systems that make it possible to automate or simplify standard procedures or make processes more efficient and effective. If external consultants are part of the selection of appropriate IT systems, successful implementation and use often fails due to the lack of fit between the IT system and the existing organizational structure or culture, as well as in relation to the human end user. Two ways to address these obstacles are the “Anyway Strategy” and “ HELIP” methods. They are the result of a meta-study on success factors and barriers in the selection and application of digitalization solutions [1] and a from a development project for digital innovations [2] in the water industry.

Das iwe-Institut für Wasser- und Energiemanagement an der Hochschule Hof hat eine Metastudie zum Stand der Digitalisierung der Wasserwirtschaft in den deutschsprachigen Ländern durchgeführt. Das Fazit: Die Digitalisierung ist zu einem festen Bestandteil technologischer Lösungen und strategischer Entscheidungen geworden. In einer dreiteiligen Serie berichtet die WasserWirtschaft über die Ergebnisse der Studie. Im dritten Teil der Serie geht es um die Frage, welche Konsequenzen aus den Erkenntnissen und Ergebnissen der Studie zu ziehen sind und wie die Zukunft der Digitalisierung in der Wasserwirtschaft aussehen kann.

Strukturveränderungen und regionale Herausforderungen hatten und haben nahezu immer direkte Folgen für die Abwasserbeseitigung einer Kommune. Dies konnte im Zuge der Corona-Pandemie deutlich durch Daten von Echtzeitmessungen im Rahmen des vom Bundesministerium für Umwelt geförderten Vorhabens „Abwasserflexibilisierung Diemelsee 4.0“ [1] festgestellt werden. Während als Planungsgrundlage für die neue Diemelsee-Kläranlage Heringhausen und das zugehörige Kanalnetz inkl. Pumpenstationen die Urlaubszahlen der vergangenen zehn Jahre Maßstab der Anlagenbemessung waren, zeigten sich sowohl während der Einfahrphase an Ostern als auch im Sommer 2020 andere, unerwartete Bewegungen bei der Gästeanzahl. Aufgrund des Lockdowns in vielen Ländern stieg die Gästezahl in Spitzenzeiten um bis zu 50 % an [2, 3]. Für die Abwasserbeseitigung weitaus problematischer war der Anstieg an Wochenendtourimus und an Wohnmobilen und damit an speziellen Abwässern. Bei der Implementation des geförderten Vorhabens „Abwasserbeseitigung Diemelsee 4.0“ wird ein spezielles Energiemonitoring eingesetzt, welches die Daten einer neuartigen, sogenannten fallbasierten Steuerung [4] aufnimmt und den Betrieb dabei unterstützt, auch in Ausnahmezeiten wie einer Pandemie die gesteckten Effizienz- und Reinigungsziele zu erreichen.

The paper at hand presents a methodology to assess, evaluate and select a package of measures that represents an appropriate integration and migration strategy for the implementation of Industry 4.0 tools. The methodology is based on a developed interaction and restriction matrix which improves the decision support process of small and medium sized enterprises (SME). The comparison of different strategies is assisted by a software tool. This structured decision process reduces the risk of misinvestment, enhances the competitiveness and raises the Industry 4.0 maturity level of SME. For a broad application area, the methodology was applied and validated in several SME.

The corporate environment is characterized by shorter product lifecycles with a growing number of variants, a high volatility in demand and increasing globalization. Manufacturing companies are therefore faced with the challenge of selecting an economically as well as ecologically reasonable operating point for their manufacturing system, while meeting volatile demands. In the present paper, the systematic approach for multi-objective operating point optimization comprises a six-step approach and contributes to the economic and ecological evaluation of operating points. Finally, an industrial evaluation of the systematic approach is shown on the basis of a case study within the plastics industry sector.

Water is increasingly taking center stage when it comes to coping with climate change. Especially in urban areas, negative consequences from heavy rainfall events and prolonged dry periods are rising worldwide. In the past, the various tasks of urban water management were performed by different departments that often did not cooperate with each other (water supply, wastewater disposal, green space irrigation, etc.), as the required water supply was not a question of available water volumes. This is already changing with climate change, in some cases even dramatically. More and more, it is necessary to consider how to distribute available water resources in urban areas, especially during dry periods, since wastewater treatment is also becoming more complex and costly. In the future, urban water management will examine water use in terms of its various objectives, and will need to provide alternative water resources for these different purposes (groundwater, river water, storm water, treated wastewater, etc.). The necessary technological interconnection requires intelligent digital systems. Furthermore, the water industry must also play its role in global CO2 reduction and make its procedural treatment processes more efficient; this will also only succeed with adequate digital systems. Although digitization has experienced an enormous surge in development over the last five years and numerous solutions are available to address the challenges described previously, there is still a large gap between the scope of offerings and their implementation. Researchers at Hof University of Applied Sciences have investigated the reasons for this imbalance as part of WaterExe4.0, the first meta-study on digitization in the German-speaking water industry, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Only 11% of roughly 700 identified products, projects and studies relate to real applications. For example, the surveyed experts of the water sector stated that everyday problems are considered too little or hardly at all in new solutions, which greatly overburdens users. Furthermore, they see no adequate possibility for a systematic analysis of new ideas to identify significant obstacles and to find the best way to start and implement a digitization project. The results from four methodologically different sub-surveys (literature and market research, survey, expert interviews and workshops) provide a reliable overview of the current situation in the German-speaking water industry and its expectations for the future. The results are also transferable to other countries.

Das iwe-Institut für Wasser und Energiemanagement an der Hochschule Hof hat eine Metastudie zum Stand der Digitalisierung der Wasserwirtschaft in den deutschsprachigen Ländern durchgeführt. Das Fazit: Die Digitalisierung ist zu einem festen Bestandteil technologischer Lösungen und strategischer Entscheidungen geworden. In einer dreiteiligen Serie berichtet die WasserWirtschaft über die Ergebnisse der Studie. Im zweiten Teil der Serie geht es um die Erkenntnis, dass Technik nicht alles ist - und wie Menschen auf dem Weg der Digitalisierung mitgenommen werden können.

This book comprises the select proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Trends in Developments of Thermofluids and Renewable Energy (TFRE 2020). The major topics covered include aerodynamics, alternate energy, bio fuel, bio heat transfer, computational fluid dynamics, control mechanism for constant power generation, and energy storage. The book also discusses latest developments in the fields of electric vehicles, hybrid power systems, and solar and renewable energy. Given the scope of its contents, this book will be useful for students, researchers, and professionals interested in the field of thermofluids and renewable energy resources.

To provide robots for a wide range of users, there needs to be an easy and intuitive way to program them. This issue is addressed by the robot programming by demonstration or imitation learning paradigm, where the user demonstrates the task to the robot by teleoperation. Although single-shot approaches could save a lot of time and effort, they are still a niche due to some drawbacks, like ambiguities in selecting the relevant features.In this work we try to enhance a single shot programming by demonstration approach on sub-symbolic level by extending it to a multi modal input. While most approaches mainly focus on the trajectories and visual detection of objects, we combine speech and kinestethic teaching in order to resolve ambiguities and to rise the level of transferred information.

Die Informationen unserer DNA sind die persönlichsten Daten, die wir kennen. Kaum eine andere Datenkategorie erlaubt ähnlich tiefe Einblicke in die Kundenbedürfnisse. Die individuelle Zuschneidung von Angeboten kann demnach heute auch auf Basis unseres Erbgutes erfolgen, und zwar im Rahmen eines „DNA-Targetings“. Auf der Grundlage einer detaillierten Analyse des Erbgutes – vermarktet als eigenständiges Produkt, mit dem sich etwa ethnische Herkunft oder Krankheitsrisiken bestimmen ­lassen – eröffnen sich zahlreiche Einsatzmöglichkeiten, von der, „streuverlustfreien“ Kommunikation über ein DNA-basiertes Kunden-Clustering bis hin zu personalisierten Ernährungsprodukten und Medikamenten. Im internationalen Kontext spielen diese Anwendungsfälle eine noch ungleich größere Rolle als in Europa, ungeachtet der auch andernorts durchaus erkannten besonderen Datenschutzproblematik. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Thematik ist daher auch dringend im akademischen Marketing hierzulande dringend geboten.

While many speech synthesis systems based on deep neural networks are thoroughly evaluated and released for free use in English, models for languages with far less active speakers like German are scarcely trained and most often not published for common use. This work covers specific challenges in training text to speech models for the German language, including dataset selection and data preprocessing, and presents the training process for multiple models of an end-to-end text to speech system based on a combination of Tacotron 2 and Multi- Band MelGAN. All model compositions were evaluated against the mean opinion score, which revealed comparable results to models in literature that are trained and evaluated on English datasets. In addition, empirical analyses identified distinct aspects influencing the quality of such systems, based on subjective user experience. All trained models are released for public use.